This Blog was created by me and for me. I dont take suggestions
and I dont really care what you have to say in regards to content
or design of this Blog. As far as individual posts go, I would
love to hear your opinions in the comment section (especially
if your opinion is radically different then mine). I try to post
often, but sometimes a week will go by where I am to busy to post
anything.

~*Words*~

Thursday, April 01, 2004

Painless Shechitah? Yeah right!

I know that most readers of my Blog are happy meat eaters. I also know that some of my carnivorous friends who read this Blog were grossed out and offended by the photos in my Meat-less Passover? article. I also am offended. I am disgusted that we humans feel the need to skin animals to keep worm, and eat their flesh to fulfill sick desires. My friend Eli and I debated the issue and he brought up the point that “Ritual slaughter is more humane”.

This is a popular misconception. When the laws were created thousands of years ago, maybe they were more human but that is not the situation today. Far from it.
Orthodox Jewish and Moslem dietary laws forbid consumption of meat from animals which are not "healthy and moving" when killed. Religious orthodoxy today interprets this to mean that kosher meat must come from animals who have not been stunned before being killed. They must be fully conscious when it's done. Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 requires, for sanitary reasons, that no slaughtered animal may fall in the blood of a previously slaughtered animal. What this means, in practice, is that animals must be killed while suspended from a conveyer belt, rather than while lying on the floor. Animals being ritually slaughtered in the United States are shackled around a rear leg, hoisted into the air, and then hang, fully conscious, upside down on the conveyer belt for between two and five minutes-and occasionally much longer if something goes wrong on the killing line before the slaughterer makes his cut. The animal upside down with ruptured joints and often a broken leg, twists frantically in pain and terror, so that it must be gripped by the neck or have a clamp inserted in its nostrils to enable the slaughterer to kill the animal with a single stroke, as religious law prescribes.

There is a debate going on now among orthodox Jews as to whether to allow animals killed by more humane methods to be considered as kosher. In Sweden, at least, the Orthodox Rabbis have come to allow animals to be stunned before slaughter. This would be a good start to following the laws of Shechitah the way they were intended to be followed for those who must have meat. My carnivorous friends, take comfort in the fact that kosher meat also contains ground rectum, colon, and shit! That goes for you to MOChassid you sick bastard!